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I’d like to start off by saying that I don’t have a clue why I’m writing this letter. Maybe I want this thing to be known to the world, or something. The events described in this letter happened about a month and a half ago, in Springdale, Kentucky, although I started writing this about two weeks ago. I just haven’t really had the guts to finish until what happened at the gas station.

The story starts in late September, when my family went to go visit our relatives, who invited us up to celebrate one of them getting like 2,000 bucks in some scratch-off lottery thing. They live in this really hillbilly part of Springdale that people from Charleston, Shepherdstown and Duncanville (basically the least redneck parts of KY) like to call “Hicksville”. We lived in Duncanville. It is way down in a valley, and exactly like how everyone pictures it when they hear about it – nothing but crappy shacks and rusty-ass rebuilt trailers.

The relatives we were visiting are absolutely weird. They all acted as if there was some sort of secret that they always had to keep hidden. Which they did, and that would be discovered later. So anyway, we’re up here in this godforsaken trailer, and it sucks. There’s like eight relatives, plus me, my dad, my mom, and my sister. About two hours in, my mom takes my cell phone so that I can “focus on the family time together” (which is crap, all we did the whole time was eat TV dinners and be forced to watch Nascar and shit). After like 6 hours of that, about ten minutes before we’re supposed to leave, it starts raining. We know how treacherous the roads can get down in the valley, so we decide to wait for the rain to die down.

Two hours later, it’s fucking dark as hell, ten o’clock, and there’s a flood warning for the area. I have my phone back by this time (no service, of course); I’m playing Tetris and Texas Hold’ Em and stuff. When suddenly I hear my dad start losing his mind in the next room. I walk over, and it turns out that they let slip that they’d buried their kid, Thomas, outside, and apparently were afraid the rain would wash up his body or some other crap. The kid was like six, he was attacked by a dog, and they never told the cops. Just fucking buried him like he was a family pet. My dad’s flipping out and rightfully so, because, you know, we live in the 21st century and all. So our relatives all say they’ll sort it all out in the morning. My parents tell me and my sister to stay in the same room as them during the night, and we do. None of us really suspected that they’d killed Thomas or anything, since they’re really peaceful. They didn’t even own any guns except for this one old rusty double-barrel shotgun they had on a mantle. Nevertheless, we were creeped the hell out, and intended to tell the cops in the morning once we got to town.

So, it was like 3 in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. Power had gone out for the fifth time or so, and I’m not able to charge my dead phone. Worst part is, I could see Thomas’s little grave right outside the window. Little cross on it and everything, and I assumed the kid couldn’t have been buried deep at all since they were so worried about him just washing up out of the grave. So I was just fixated on it. I kept being drawn to look out the window. And then I saw the fucking worst thing in my life. Something was creeping through the trees toward the house. I stared at it for a while, but couldn’t get a good look at it since it was raining and the brush was so thick. For a few minutes I assumed it was two really pale horses, kind of ambling through the woods side-by-side. But then it walked into the moonlight, and I saw that it was all one thing, like some kind of human torso, but wider. It finally stepped into full view, and I saw it had something like six legs, kind of somewhere between a beetle’s legs and a horse’s legs. Two arms, right where someone would normally have them, but they were about a half a foot longer than any normal man’s arms. It had a bald head, but the face looked like some sort of fucking bizarre blank kind of mask, this clenched-up, furrowed forehead and a nose that looked sort of like a raven’s beak. It didn’t have eyes, either…just the sockets where eyes would go. It looked like it had a human mouth, just a very large one. What still strikes me to this day is that it seemed to have a stinger on its back. Right between where a normal person would have shoulder blades. The thing moved sort of gracefully, and made these soft thump-thumping noises when it moved. It must’ve been like seven, or eight feet tall, but sounded like it weighed maybe only 100 pounds at most.

It starts walking towards Thomas’s grave, and then I finally snap out of whatever trance I was in, and scream. My mom is the first to wake up, and I tell her to look out the window. She rushes over, and doesn’t really seem to understand what she’s looking at. After a minute, though, the thing bends down and starts pawing at the grave with its clawed hands. My dad and Jasper, my uncle, rush in, and Jasper fucking loses his shit. Screams like a little girl, runs back out of the room, yelling for his father screaming “It’s outside, it came and it’s outside!”

I look back and see the thing is digging furiously at the ground, kicking up huge mounds of dirt. I hear the sound of feet running around the house. I think they were looking for the shotgun. The thing reaches into the hole and grabs up what I assume was Thomas’s body by the leg in one hand. The thing kind of gallops back into the woods, snapping all these branches and shit, and then that’s when we all hear it:

A kid crying. The sound of a child sobbing and crying, from the direction that the thing took off in. So we left as soon as the rain let up, at like 5 am. I don’t even think we told anyone at the house, just drove straight back to Duncanville, only stopping for gas. No one said a word to each other. My family refuses to speak about what happened; I tried to bring it up once, just to make sure it was real. My dad told me to shut the fuck up, so I did. I started writing this about three weeks after it happened, but just saved it in a school folder and left it alone. Never mentioned it to any of my friends or anything, just tried to erase it from my mind. It mostly worked, up until I went to work.

See, I work at this gas station in Duncanville from 8 pm to 3 am. I work the register, keep the place clean, and take out the trash. When I was bringing the trash bags over to the back of the building for the dude in the morning to take care of, I heard what I had assumed to be some junkie kicking around in the dumpster. I yelled at whoever it was a couple of times to get the hell out before I called the cops. But as I walked towards the source of the noise. I suddenly heard those same footsteps. That soft thump-thump. Hooves or feet, or whatever the hell they were. I turned right around and went back into the store and hid behind the counter. I look over at the outside security monitor and see some kind of movement from just off screen, something huge casting a shadow and moving. I caught a glimpse of…I don’t know, an elbow or something. A pale limb, darting in and out of view. It had to have been the same thing. I waited for it to leave, and after a while, it did. I woke up behind the counter at 1 am this morning. I was in complete fear of the creature that was pursuing me. But it was gone now, and now I had nothing to fear. At least for the moment. That was when I heard the cry. The cry of a child. Then there was scratching at the back door. I ran back and made sure that the door was locked, which it was. Thankfully, the back door had no window on it, so I didn’t have to see what was there. I went back to the register and looked at the security cameras. A young boy, around the age of 6, was scratching on the door. His head leaned at a strange angle, and some of his flesh had fallen off. But what was even more disturbing about it was that he seemed to be growing extra limbs. And a strange pointed one was starting to jut from his back, right between the shoulder blades… I continued to cower behind the register until I fell asleep again.

I woke up this morning to my boss flipping out because I was asleep on his floor. He was probably thinking I was a drug addict or something. I took the whole week off to stay at home, waiting for the creature to come back. Every so often, it does. I sit and I wait for that creature to finally have me. I have photocopied this letter and mailed it to all the people that I hold dear. You may find me dead one day, if you don’t find a way to help me first. The power has been out at my house for a while, and the phones don’t work. I’m going to go outside for the first time in a long time to mail these. Hopefully, it isn’t waiting. I hear it now, and I may have just heard a window break. Maybe I won’t get this out for a while until it’s gone. Or maybe not at all, depending on whether or not the shadow looming over me is my imagination. Thump, thump.